QOTD: "This site has always promoted free speech and the idea of merit-based intellectualism (recall, I used to invite leftwing bloggers to guest post here, and I invited debates between competing ideological positions); it has fought consistently — and with much vigor — against a progressive epistemological paradigm that hopes to decouple meaning from intent and replace the locus of meaning with motivated “interpretive communities” in a (political) linguistic coup that I’ve spent years pointing out is the anti-foundational justification for collectivism and, ultimately, intellectual (and eventually political) totalitarianism. From identity politics to political correctness to the idea that the receiver of a message gets to determine its meaning with respect to the intentions of the speaker, the left’s philosophical agenda has been to diminish the individual and raise the collective, to empower political blocs (which the left plays against each other, and also collects into its voting coalition by way of often competing panders) and to de-authenticate the individual, particularly if he refuses to adopt the identity narrative put forth by the given group to which he is ostensibly socially assigned." --Protein Wisdom